Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.

Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It’s really counterintuitive.

I couldn’t take pictures of green rolling hills.

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.

The stars shall fade away, the sun himself Grow dim with age, and nature sink in years, But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth, Unhurt amidst the wars of elements, The wrecks of matter, and the crush of worlds.

There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I.

There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.

The environment is everything that isn’t me.

There are more men ennobled by study than by nature.

Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so.

I am proud to have been born in Iowa. Through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy, it was a place of adventure and daily discoveries – the wonder of the growing crops, the excitements of the harvest, the journeys to the woods for nuts and hunting, the joys of snowy winters, the comfort of the family fireside, of good food and tender care.

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

The sky is the part of creation in which nature has done for the sake of pleasing man.

When we go out to the country and just sit there, what we’re really doing is just switching off various kinds of alertness that we don’t have to use. When we do that, we are stopping being defensive. We are no longer shutting ourselves off from different types of experiences, we are welcoming them in.

I have a deep, deep belief that if I tell you I’m going to crack you with a clean shot to the chin inside one minute of the first round and you will be unconscious, well, then that’s what will happen.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.

In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires.

Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.

I must have been one of the least surprised people on earth on September 11. I felt very braced for that. I knew something like that was going to come.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.

Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.

No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.

A queer fellow and a jolly fellow is the grasshopper. Up the mountains he comes on excursions, how high I don’t know, but at least as far and high as Yosemite tourists.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.

God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.

A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease.

We must accept what science tells us, that man was born from the earth. But, more logical than the scientists who lecture us, we must carry this lesson to its conclusion: that is to say, accept that man was born entirely from the world – not only his flesh and bones but his incredible power of thought.

If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.

It’s just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.

O wise man! Give your wealth only to the worthy and never to others. The water of the sea received by the clouds is always sweet.

Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come.

Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone.

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.

Flowers… are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.

We all dream. We dream vividly, depending on our nature. Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we’re atheist.

Everything is the product of one universal creative effort. There is nothing dead in Nature. Everything is organic and living, and therefore the whole world appears to be a living organism.

Virtue is a habit of the mind, consistent with nature and moderation and reason.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.

I’m crepuscular.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the ‚Not Me,‘ that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, ‚Nature.‘

Time destroys the speculation of men, but it confirms nature.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

I think that I do feel that my nature is to express what this self, this particular self at this time, experiences in the world. And that is so organic – I use this metaphor a lot but I’ll use it again – it’s like a pine tree producing pine cones, or a blackberry bush producing blackberries – it’s just what happens with this being, now.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name. The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; the Named is the mother of all things.

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly – that is the first law of nature.

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

Storms make trees take deeper roots.

It is a curious historical fact that modern quantum mechanics began with two quite different mathematical formulations: the differential equation of Schroedinger and the matrix algebra of Heisenberg. The two apparently dissimilar approaches were proved to be mathematically equivalent.

Water is the driving force of all nature.

I am against nature. I don’t dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can’t touch with decay.